Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor

 The great Jelly Roll Morton once told folklorist Alan Lomax that the song “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” was one of the earlier country blues to come rambling into the big city of New Orleans, that it was being played in the Crescent City many years before he was born there in the 1880s. The song was even known to be favorite of that jazz forefather, the legendary cornetist Buddy Bolden. But it wasn’t only in New Orleans; up in Memphis, Jelly Roll’s rival songwriter, W.C. Handy, must have heard it too, because, well, he re-appropriated big chunks of the same song for his “Atlanta Blues,” which Louis Armstrong put on a disc in 1954. The Flood got its version from a recording made a half dozen years later for Folkways by the late great Boston bluesmen Rolf Cahn and Eric Von Schmidt. Here, then — with some sweet soloing by Veezy, Sam, Randy and Doug — is our little homage to those earliest days of jazz.